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Quote:Our Verdict

The Ryzen 5 3600 is an excellent 65W chip for small form factor enthusiasts, packing quite the punch in a small thermal envelope. After simple one-click overclocking, it offers nearly the same performance as its more expensive counterpart, but at a $50 discount. That makes the Ryzen 5 3600 the uncontested value champ in its price range.

For

Low price
Excellent performance in gaming and applications
PCIe 4.0 support
bundled cooler
Low power consumption
Unlocked multiplier
Backward compatibility

Against

No cheap B-series motherboards with PCIe 4.0
Limited overclocking headroom
No integrated graphics

AMD's value proposition has always been straightforward -- more for less. While we typically think of AMD offering more cores than Intel for less money, the strategy also applies to the company's unrestrained feature sets for each processor, regardless of price. That includes in-box coolers, Hyper-Threading (AMD calls it SMT), and unlocked multipliers that enable easy overclocking, all of which are features that Intel either leaves out or disables on some of its chips in the name of segmentation.

Instead of squeezing out extra dollars from its customers, AMD gives you the same basic underlying features with the $199 six-core 12-thread Ryzen 5 3600 that it gives you with its full-fledged counterpart, the $249 Ryzen 5 3600X that we recently named the best mid-range processor on the market. That means the Ryzen 5 3600 has the same six-core 12-thread design, 32MB of L3 cache, and access to 24 lanes of PCIe 4.0, with the only tradeoff being a step back to the 65W Wraith Stealth cooler, while the 3600X comes with the more-capable 95W Wraith Spire cooler.

What does that mean to you? While the Ryzen 5 3600 is a great processor that packs a wonderful amount of performance into a 65W TDP envelope, a boon for small form factor enthusiasts, you can also overclock it and attain similar performance in many applications, like gaming, to the Ryzen 5 3600X (one of our best CPUs). But you save fifty bucks in the process while still getting class-leading features, like the PCIe 4.0 interface.

This follows the same AMD trend we’ve seen in the past, with overclockability making the non-X models a better value for enthusiasts than the pricier X-series models. But if you’re chasing the absolute highest frame rates you can get out of a six-core processor, be aware that the Ryzen 5 3600 chips might not reach the peak overclocking speeds of 3600X models. In either case, the solid blend of features and overclockability makes the Ryzen 5 3600 the clear choice for enthusiasts looking for a great value on a mid-range processor.

AMD isn't sitting still though: The company recently released its own new flagship, the 16-core 32-thread Ryzen 9 3950X, to fend off Intel's new challengers. That chip slots into a much higher tier than the 3950X, but it brings competitive gaming performance and much more threaded horsepower for those looking for the ultimate in performance.

Ryzen 5 3600

Like the other Ryzen 3000 chips, the six-core 12-thread Ryzen 5 3600 comes with a 7nm compute die (with two disabled physical cores) paired with a 12nm I/O die. These two components come together into a single package that fits inside a 65W TDP envelope, making it physically identical to the 95W Ryzen 5 3600X.

The Ryzen 5 3600 has slightly lower clock speeds than the 3600X, with its 3.6 GHz base and 4.2 GHz Precision Boost 2 frequencies, a difference of 200 MHz in both measurements.

The 3600’s 4.2 GHz boost frequency is lower than the $192 Core i5-9500’s 4.4 GHz boost, but its 3.6 GHz base frequency equates to a 600 MHz advantage that, paired with AMD's drastic improvement to its instruction per cycle (IPC) throughput, will equate to higher performance in heavy workloads, not to mention the six additional threads of the AMD part. It’s notable that, unlike the previous-gen Ryzen models and Intel’s chips, AMD only guarantees the peak boost frequency on one core, while other cores could have lesser capabilities. Head to our Not All Ryzen 3000 Cores are Created Equal article for more information on that front.

Compared to the $182 Core i5-9400F, the 3600 has an 800 MHz base and 100 MHz boost frequency advantage. The Ryzen 5 3600 comes with a bundled 65W Wraith Stealth cooler, and while both the Core i5-9500 and -9400F come with stock coolers, they are of significantly lower quality. However, both of the Intel processors come with integrated graphics, while the Ryzen 5 3600 requires a discrete graphics card. If you’re not planning on incorporating a discrete GPU in your build, the Intel processors are the obvious choice.
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